Being a typical deerhound x lurcher he doesn't offer a lot of spontaneous behaviour around the house apart from spontaneous sleeping, and recall when he hears the fridge door
So I'll plonk a box in front of him, and look meaningfully at it... We've got to the stage where he will repeatedly nudge it with his nose to get a treat, though he still looks a bit worried as if he's thinking 'This can't be right,' but if I then don't click because I want to move on, he'll stare at me (knowing eye contact often gets a reward), gives me a questioning bark, and then lie down, looking rather disconsolate. Sometimes he'll throw in some other command he knows - typically 'shy boy' (covers face with paw), though I only recently taught him this and he doesn't reliably do it on command yet. I also free shaped him to stand on a carpet tile, and now get him to move from tile to tile on the command 'mat' (sometimes with a treat on the floor in between which he is told to leave). But I found I was introducing words and prompts (e.g. pointing at the mat I wanted him to move to) quite early on, and wondered if I was going too fast.
I would like to build his confidence, but with a dog who likes direction and worries when he doesn't know what is expected of him, can free shaping be a bad idea? Will he be happier with more conventional training? Or am I just going too fast for him, and not rewarding enough behaviours?
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